Dan's Papers - June 5, 2009 - Who's Here: Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, Poet Laureate

When a prisoner in Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan's poetry class at a local jail was beaten by other prisoners for coming to the class, Nuzzo-Morgan cried. Empathy, she believes, is the poet's middle name.

Nuzzo-Morgan, who was appointed Poet Laureate of Suffolk County last month by the Suffolk County Legislature and a panel of former Suffolk County poet laureates, feels that suffering other people's pain helps create the vibrant, emotionally-driven poetry she has created for 30 years.

"My purpose as a poet is to 'let you rest in the cave of my mouth,'" she said, quoting from one of her poems. "It means that whatever you're feeling, let me say it for you. That's what poetry does. You can have empathy and write about it without bleeding all over the page," she said.

That means there is discipline in writing poetry, she said.

"In writing a poem, there's a lot of empathy and therapy there, but once it's on the page, it needs some polishing, and that's when I go to work on a poem. That's the difference between writing in a journal and creating a poem. I can write for therapeutic reasons, but the poet says now we have to edit it - we have to make it general enough for people to understand."

Nuzzo-Morgan, of Southampton, is probably best known locally as the founder and director of the North Sea Poetry Scene, which offers poetry readings and publishes poetry. Nuzzo-Morgan has also written several books of poetry, including For Michael, her newest book about the tragic death of her 17-year-old son Michael who was hit by a speeding car in 1995.

Nuzzo-Morgan, originally from Patchogue, is married to contractor Joseph Morgan, a Southampton native. They have two children, Vincent and Eliza.

Other books include: The Bitter The Sweet; Let Me Tell You Something; Fleeting; and, a children's book due out in the fall, Would You Hug A Porcupine? Her poetry has been published in many journals including Blue Sand Magazine, Proteus Anthology, Gertrude Magazine, Dream International, Writing to Heal, The Agulia Expression, The Write Way, The Rio Grande Press, Long Island Quarterly, Performing Poets Association Literary Review and Dream Long Island.

The children's book is a first for Nuzzo-Morgan, who co-authored it with David Bunn Martine, the curator of the Shinnecock Museum.

"If you take it on the surface, it's just a nice book about the children playing or being with different animals. But it's really a book about breaking down the walls of bias and fear, and the animals are used as a metaphor," she said. "It's also a nature book about how we have to have respect for all the creatures."

Writing the book about her son, Michael, was, "very therapeutic, very healing," she said, though it took her years to be able to write about his death. "It took five years to even speak about holding his hand at the hospital," she said. Her other poetry is confessional at times. She writes about the other pains she has suffered in her life and says she is emotionally connected to a poem while she is writing it, but has to disconnect when she reads her poetry out loud.

She'll probably be doing a lot of reading aloud in her job as poet laureate. She will read from her poetry Wednesday, June 17 at 5 p.m. at "In It Together: Art and the Economic Crisis," a half-day conference on the local arts and the economy to be held at Guild Hall.

Though Nuzzo-Morgan said the job has "no official function," she plans to help create a sense of community in the position. One way she intends to do that is to create a local poetry archive.

"I have this great vision of an arts/archival center," she said. "Maybe something in conjunction with the Southampton Historical Society. This is going to be the cornerstone of my tenure. It would not only be a place where poetry is stored. This will be a living collection - a living, breathing space where people can go and read the different poems created over the years," she said.

She has, in storage, over 1,000 books, audio tapes, video tapes, and photography all related to poetry on Long Island. The oldest book is dated 1821, and edited by William Cullen Bryant, an American Romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post in the 1800s.

The task of putting this archive together will not be easy for Nuzzo-Morgan, whose personal and professional schedule is demanding. In addition to her day job as a (surprise!) tax consultant and accountant, she is also a student in the Stony Brook Southampton Masters of Fine Arts Program in Writing and Literature. In addition to the classes she teaches in jails, she also teaches poetry through BOCES in schools in Suffolk. After receiving a degree from the Stony Brook Southampton graduate program, she plans to expand her teaching of poetry.

Her poetry workshops at a local jail will also continue under her tenure. It has been through working with the prisoners, men and women, that she has expanded her understanding of empathy. In addition to working with the young man who was beaten for his participation, she reached out to another young man with a long jail sentence who tried to commit suicide in the jail.

He was forced to wear a Velcro dress that prison guards could get off him in a hurry if he tried to commit suicide again. The prisoners in the class refused to socialize with the young man because he was wearing a dress.

But Nuzzo-Morgan encouraged him to keep coming to the class to write about his emotional experiences. "He was finally able to collect his thoughts and wrote some wonderful poems. Were they Pulitzer Prize material? No, but they showed an emotional connection, and I began to see him engaging more with the rest of the prisoners."

She published three of his poems in an anthology of prisoners' poems she edited called Finding Our Voices.